Publishers Weekly
04/18/2022
In this urgent, vehement, and sardonic debut, White questions the status quo, public and private discourse, and hope. As a salient motif, she invites the reader to reassess their perceptions: "congratulations,/ you have chosen what makes it easier to not see me with difficulty. I understand/ how hard it can be to know in order for you to eat, someone else had to starve" ("november 9, 2016"). In the trenchant "lump," White envisions creating an illustration for the police: "in this part the girl is without head./ I draw her bone-jut and sweet—/ an extravagant lump referencing what isn't present." She proceeds to powerfully declare that "perhaps a headless girl can be imagined humanely./ perhaps this girl will be treated as if she were/ headed...// gonna make me a girl you can't knee press,/ officer. Make her of ground she's already down on.// you can't tell her ‘get down' further if she is/ ground itself." The language throughout is textural, limber, and torrential, suited to be read aloud as White captures the daily struggles faced by women of color. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
In Casual Conversation, White attends to an axiomatic ground in the pagefield. She teaches me something about the collaborative dreaming that we can be. I am saying that there is something for us here in the complex Quiets of this meditative, sustained, and intimately political work. It is something so vital and so unstoppably generative that I can only think to call it unrest.”
—Aracelis Girmay, from the Foreword
“Whether waxing philosophical or poetic or recalling the inner monologues of the human spirit living moment to moment in lifetimes, telling tales of tattling, playing the dozens, or testifying, recalling lynch ropes or racial memory, Renia White’s Casual Conversation is not casual nor conversant in the denouement of passivity, but are rigorously passionate inner monologues—interrogations, perhaps—preoccupied with the human eye, ear, and heart. In her muted Miles-Bearden collaged renderings, White is as bold and brash and confident and causal as a musician, painter, filmmaker stopping us dead in our tracks (as Ntozake Shange reminds us poems should do like a kiss) at such self-assured soliloquies and spirited solos that are ‘just gorgeous.’ Her stilted syntax stutters lead you into the poem slant yet makes you ‘come through the front door.’ In these ‘blue rummage,’ dialectics you marvel at the mastery as White splits the personal wide open for the political (church burnings; confederate flag unlatching; mother-daughter remorse and reckoning) to merge and mingle with your ‘ear to the root’ of her blues: to what matters in her bright and shining ‘hope room’ of a debut.”
—Tony Medina, author of I Am Alfonso Jones and Death, With Occasional Smiling
“Casual Conversation, true to its title, contains poems of such killing nonchalance both in what they say and in the many unsayables finding space in-between memorable line after memorable line. The way Renia White finds and inhabits space is a stellar pushback against erasure and absence. A timely collection by a timeless poet.”
—Ishion Hutchinson, author of House of Lords and Commons: Poems
